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Now that you’ve made your way onto Facebook and started moving up your ad game, you need to cement something in the minds of your customers. You need to show your clients your product or service in more than just posts, you need to show them in real time. This is where video ads come in. It is an extremely effective way to both introduce people to your product and pull them in to get the sales. Video advertising, especially on social media, is a fantastic way to extend your reach.

Continue reading for Sparkfactor’s effective and necessary tips to make your video ads a success.

This weekend, all of Chicago is looking forward to beating the heat by watching the skies from the beach. With close to 2 million people in attendance every year during August, the Chicago Air & Water Show is the largest free air & water exhibition in the country. We all love to hear the plane engines roar by and paint trails of smoke in the sky. With sand between your toes and a drink of choice in hand, it’s so much fun to watch those incredible stunts being performed.

As you sit back on the beach with the rest of the crowd, take time to reflect upon your business. What have you accomplished this summer? Do you believe you’ve done enough to grow your business? Are you soaring to the heights you could be reaching?

Hosting: What Is It?

As your business expands, you’ll need a place to host your presence online. A place to house your website, keep people engaged, and manage increased traffic. To make your websites accessible across the Internet, you’ll need to choose a web hosting provider. Some well known providers are GoDaddy, DreamHost and Hostgator, which are used by thousands of sites across the web. We hope this brief overview provides some guidance as you navigate servers and hosting.

Continue reading for Sparkfactor’s tips about web hosting and what it does, by using examples from our clients who have come to us for help.

Gonesh, an incense company and a longtime client of ours, came to us with an exciting opportunity that had been offered to them: a partnership with a minor league baseball team that would include running a 30 second ad for Gonesh on the videoboard during every home game for the 2018 season.

Midwest Performance Cars came to Sparkfactor looking for help with an ad. They wanted to place an ad in the Porsche Club of America Chicago’s magazine to advertise their Porsche repair services. They also wanted to update the previous ad to look more inviting and have images take up more space.

Last April I spent a very rainy and cold Saturday traveling around Chicago with some friends, running in and out bookstores, collecting punchcards. It was the last Saturday of the month—Independent Bookstore Day—and we were participating in the first My Chicago Bookstore Challenge: if you visited 10 of the participating independent bookstores throughout the city and suburbs, you received a 10% discount from all participating stores for the next year; if you visited 15, you got 15%. We succeeded in visiting 11 participating bookstores and several more that weren't on the list, just for fun.

The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council selected Sparkfactor to create an informational brochure and annual report for the Special Service Area #13, the Stockyards Industrial Park, which is under purview of the BYNC.

The content provided from BYNC detailed the services the SSA provides to the area, surrounding community, and business climate. They made it easy to inform their audience about what a Special Service Area is and what SSA #13 has accomplished. We used Adobe to create the tri-fold brochure. Each section has a different background color to distinguish itself from surrounding sections, and the brochure also includes relevant images.

In Chicago, there are Special Service Areas (SSAs) throughout the city, streets that are economic thoroughfares in the neighborhood. SSAs are under local neighborhood organizations and provide services to business owners, like facade and building improvements and marketing and advertising of the area.

The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council has several SSAs under its care, one of which is SSA #39 Brighton Park and Archer Heights, which was established in 2007. These two lesser known neighborhoods on the Southwest Side of the city are connected through the SSA, which runs southwest down a portion of Archer Ave from California in Brighton Park to Pulaski in Archer Heights. The SSA commission wanted to create a brand identity and an ad campaign to increase the awareness of the area, not only to bring in more visitors from around the city and tourists that happen to pass through the transportation in the area, but also to encourage locals to see their neighborhood as a place to invest in with their time and money.

The Rogers Park Business Alliance has a few different City of Chicago Special Service Areas (SSAs) under its purview, including SSA #43. SSA #43 includes a good portion of Devon Avenue (a busy east/west street in Chicago) and a part of Western Avenue (the city's longest continuous street). SSA #43 wanted to develop a brand identity for the area and an ad campaign to draw people—city residents and tourists alike—to the businesses to boost the local economy and show off what Devon has to offer.

Baseball is back! Today was supposed to be the opening day for Wrigley Field, but with the snow that fell this morning in Chicago, the Cubs decided to postpone the game, while the White Sox found a pretty ingenious way of dealing with the snow on their field to still play their home opener.

As the Cubs were prepping for Opening Day, I'm sure they wanted to get as many people as possible in the stands. In the days leading up April 9, I came across Facebook ads in my feed reminding me that Opening Day tickets were still available.

The ads themselves are simple: nine words, the Cubs hashtag for the year, and a couple of photos with stadium seats. But there's so much communicated in such a simple ad that it should act as the template for your future social ads.